That is a promise from the man in charge, who was there three years ago, at the scene of the crime. Jim Fassel is not going to make a whole bunch of guarantees about the Giants’ upcoming playoff game, but he is eager to take a stand here.

His Giants will not turn into a back-biting, self-destructing mess, as they did the last time the franchise found its way into the playoffs. His players will not swear and point fingers at each other and have to be restrained from coming to blows with one another. And his team will not blow its cool and its lead in a dizzying and devastating series of events that turned sure victory into stunned defeat.

It won’t happen again. So says Jim Fassel. Is he sure?

“Positive,” he stated.

“We won’t lose our focus like that. That was kind of the thing that started a lot of it. You can just feel it slipping away. We haven’t had that all year.”

Not many Giants remain from the debacle that unfolded the last time they took part in a playoff game, but the handful of survivors is sure the bitter infighting and incredible collapse that ruined a storybook season will not and cannot happen again.

“It was disgusting,” Sam Garnes recalled.

Those who were involved would rather forget the sordid details crammed into the unbelievable 23-22 wild-card loss to the Vikings on Dec. 27, 1997. There were so many atrocities. A wild third-quarter scene in which Giants defensive players fought amongst themselves, with Conrad Hamilton and Phillippi Sparks nearly coming to blows, with Jessie Armstead and Sam Garnes trying to act as peacemakers. The angry shouting match on the bench between Michael Strahan and Keith Hamilton, caught on national TV, ended only when defensive coordinator John Fox stepped in the way a referee would separate two wild-eyed boxers. Tiki Barber, after a fumble, getting chewed out by Sparks, not appreciating the nasty words one bit.

The repeated ugliness set the stage for as monumental and complete breakdown of body, spirit and professionalism. The Giants, leading 19-3 at halftime, still led 22-13 with 90 seconds left when their poise disintegrated and their lead vanished. There was a touchdown pass from Randall Cunningham to Jake Reed, as Tito Wooten took a terrible angle on the ball and then was forced to sit the final moments out with a bruised shin. There was a fateful on-side kick that bounced directly to Chris Calloway, owner of the surest hands on the team. Calloway did not hold on, the Vikings recovered and disaster was imminent. There was a pass interference penalty on Sparks, a 16-yard run by Robert Smith and finally, a 24-yard field goal by Eddie Murray with 10 seconds remaining to complete the chaotic ending.

No one who was there will ever forget it.

“The way the thing ended made it the most unusual game I had ever been involved with,” said general manager Ernie Accorsi, who at the time was an assistant to George Young. “I remember George and I sitting there in disbelief. When they were lining up to kick the field goal you knew you were dead. You almost felt what happened was inevitable once they recovered the on-side kick.”

Those who were there prefer not to recount the bad memories. Only three players on offense and five on defense remain intact in the starting lineup from that playoff nightmare. “There’s only a handful of us who remember that,” said Strahan, one of the holdovers. “For us, I think, because of the new guys we have around here who don’t remember it or don’t know about it, no one talks about it, so we don’t.”

Fassel is adamant that his team this time around is far more mature and far less dependent on personalities that were not as stable as they needed to be. “I went about working on it so that that would never happen again,” Fassel said. “You can’t order that. You can think you can, but that’s not going to solve the problem. It’s ingrained in the personality they have.”

In their final two regular-season victories, the Giants were forced to come from behind to beat the Cowboys and Jaguars, evidence that this team does not unravel in the face of adversity. The playoff team in ’97 did just that.

“It was disgusting and it was embarrassing to ourselves and the team,” Garnes recalled. “I was a young guy trying to be a peacemaker. That’s not a good sign right there. I remember people fighting, arguing, a couple fights on the sideline, everything that could go bad went bad. It was on national TV. I was thinking there were people out there who were involved who were going to be embarrassed the next day. Mr. Mara and the coach, it looked bad for all of us. We have a lot of new faces around here, so that won’t happen again.

“You don’t have to worry about anything like that this season. We’re a lot more mature, we’re not selfish out there, we’re out for one thing and that’s to win.”